An integrated, systems-wide approach is needed for public–private partnerships to drive genetic innovation in crops

Public–private partnerships are key to successfully translate knowledge to products, but current frameworks do not foster the systems-wide approach required to improve crops to meet the agricultural production challenges of the 21st century.

innovation has often been achieved by advancing research projects in isolation or in parallel within academia and industry. The inherent difficulty in managing and reconciling the differences in goals, incentives, processes, and ways of working between academia and industry, as well as the reluctance to address upfront points of contention such as intellectual property and data sharing, often narrows the scope of joint projects, thereby limiting the ambition of these partnerships.
The urgent need to address agricultural production challenges calls for a renewed way of working, specifically, for a more collective and integrative manner with efficient public-private partnerships (PPP) at its heart. The pharmaceutical industry faced similar challenges in the early part of this century [4]. To increase innovation, reduce the translational gap (from fundamental research to products), and accelerate the time needed to deliver solutions to patients, mixed models of research and development partnerships were established between industry and academia. This resulted in large, well-funded, and impactful initiatives that injected innovation into the system. How can these experiences inspire and guide us to improve the effectiveness of PPPs in crop improvement? Beyond the need for a strong common sense of purpose and the willingness to acknowledge and actively align each other's core objectives, best management practices (such as an appropriate consortium management structure), and an independent, neutral, and empowered facilitator acting as a platform to manage calls for projects and government funding are cited as key success factors [5,6].
We believe that the time is ripe for the agricultural research world at large to address the looming productivity gap [7] through a systems-wide approach with the same urgency, ambition, and scale as that adopted by the biomedical world. We also need to address the additional imperative of improving multiple crops concurrently without diluting already scarce resources, especially those in the public funding systems [8]. Systems approaches that rely on problem solving by interdisciplinary or, even better, transdisciplinary teams and that are managed through organizational integration are especially relevant to the crop improvement ecosystem, given the diversity of players and of interactions between and for each crop. While there is a history of PPPs in support of crop improvement and some success stories [8], they have very rarely traversed disciplinary boundaries or managed the integration dimension. They also suffered from myopic visions and a lack of long-term and large-scale funding that resulted in an estimated rate of 99% of new agri-food technologies not reaching markets [8].
It is time for a bold, broad, integrated systemic approach in PPPs for crop improvement that will establish shared grand visions for each crop. We need strategies that integrate the "product-driven" framework deployed in industry to aggressively tackle the current bottlenecks from ideation to commercialization (Table 1), focus basic and applied research funding on crops as the new model plants to reduce the time to commercialization, and enhance the connections and alignment between the public and private partners of the ecosystem through professional and dedicated neutral coordinators that can manage diverse sources of funding. Private industry needs to be incentivized to share their data so that novel machine learning capabilities can be deployed to boost knowledge building in crop biology and increase overall competitiveness, as has been done in the Melloddy project and elsewhere in biomedicine [9]. The contributions of all public and private partners need to be rewarded with a return on investments by incorporating mechanisms to share intellectual property and revenues to ensure long-term funding and ambitious goals of the PPP. We must embrace transdisciplinary, translational science that breaks down silos between disciplines and the different levels of organization within the plant biological system [10]. Finally, we need to integrate within these partnerships highly exploratory activities to fuel innovation [11] and work experience in industry and government as key components of educational curricula that will enable swift career shifts and better prepare students for success in translational science.
While daunting, we see some signs for hope. With the increasing recognition by industry of the benefits of PPPs to fuel innovation, several industry-led efforts have contributed to improve important crops by sharing knowledge, resources, and products. Recently, driven by the promises of genome editing for transforming crop improvement and crop health, a number of startups have emerged. They are very often led by people with a mixed background in academia and industry and a deep understanding of the value of collaboration between the 2 worlds. Further, initiatives like Crops Of The Future, supported by the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research, are heading in the right direction. Here, decisions to tackle bottlenecks with investments in key crops are taken collectively and are supported by an independent facilitator in a framework established at the onset to address friction points between parties. While promising, these efforts are not yet at the scale that will result in the step-change needed for crop production. Thus, it is urgent that the crop improvement community at large embraces and further multiplies PPPs to tackle together one of the biggest challenges of our times.